Change the Channel
by girlwiththefandomtattoo
Summary: a series of e/é aus based on television shows.


_**there's a fire on the field, kid - friday night lights au**_

* * *

We open on a young teenager. The whoops and hollers of small town Texas echo not so far in the distance. But our young man stalks into a rundown diner in the dry night air, his backpack scraping the ground because he can't be bothered to sling it over his back. The diner glows like a beacon. He doesn't want to go in, but he can't stop his feet from moving forward all the same. A paper, ink laden and pulsating with some sort of inherent evil, remains crushed between five calloused fingers.

The uniformed woman cleaning the counter smiles her familiar smile, all sarcastic curved lips betrayed by sincere doe eyes. He doesn't return the smile, but sits heavy on an empty chrome stool. Well, most of the seats in the place are empty, but this one is close to her, so it's where he sits. He drops his head into the counter and her smile falls.

"Coach can't do anything about it."

"What do you mean?" She drops the rag from her hand. "He got an entire grade changed for that damn kid who can't figure out the difference between a sine and a cosine."

The boy picks his head up, sweat matted blonde hair tattooing tendrils across a tanned forehead. "No, it's not that Coach won't do anything about it, it's that he can't. It's this fucking—"

"Language."

"—teacher. He just… he just doesn't care about football."

She chews her lips and watches the boy rub at his dangerously red eyes. Making a choice, she holds her hand across the counter, palm up, fingers wiggling.

"Gimme the letter. I'll go talk to him myself."

—-

Cut to the high school. Probably the next day, after class has been dismissed and the football team has taken over the field, yelps and grunts and shouted plays filling out the soundtrack to a typical West Texas fall twilight hour. Summer still digs her fingers in, the sun hanging in the air higher than it should, longer than you'd think. A teacher yanks at his tie in a now emptied classroom and throws a window shut to block out the sounds of bodies thumping against the astroturf.

A knock at the door, followed closely by a female body entering, not waiting for the permission she just requested.

"Are you Mr. Enjolras?" She barks out from across the room, folding her arms over a freshly stained diner uniform. White tank top, pink checkered apron. The Musain on the end of Main Street. He recognized her. Kinda. Maybe.

"Yes Ma'am," he confirms. He waits for her to come closer for a second that feels a lot longer than it actually is before crossing the room with an outstretched palm. She accepts the handshake with a violent enthusiasm that jerks his right shoulder forward in a pointedly painful way.

"Yeah, okay, so where do you get off, huh?"

Enjolras tilts his head and steps back with a deep inhale, dropping her hand in the process. Her arms have already re-crossed themselves, her hip angled out to one side in wait for his answer.

"I'm not— uh…" An uncharacteristic filler word hangs on his lips as he assesses the situation. "I'm not sure I catch your meaning. Who are you?"

"I'm Éponine Thénardier," she says, digging into the _r _like only a Texas girl can. But the name sounds more like a challenge, really, with her eyebrows arched nearly into her hairline like that. "Gavroche's older sister slash legal guardian."

He closes his eyes and takes another deep breath, crossing his own arms in understanding. He'd already dealt with the Coach about this whole ordeal and thought — foolishly, he now realized — it had been sealed. The kid was failing his class and that made him ineligible to play. The fact that he was a starting wide-receiver didn't mean anything. You can't play if you don't have the grades. Simple as that.

Or not, according to West Texas social mores.

Shame on Mr. Enjolras, right?

Licking his lips, sizing her up, he begins: "Look, I under—"

Then she interrupts him, blazing a warpath with her words. Fingers flying. Teeth bared. Her hair whips around her as she gesticulates, soaking in the deep purples streaming through the windows and leaving a ribbon of galaxy whirling around her. Curse words pepper and punctuate. She doesn't even give him the chance to think about getting in a word edgewise.

He's not quite sure what she is, but she is something.

—-

Smash cut to Friday night in full swing. Announcers blare and cheerleaders chant while helmets meet shoulder pads. A familiar chaos. She stands shoulder-to-shoulder with every living breathing human that lives this God forsaken place, packed into a stadium far too expensive for a town with only a miles of dry oil rigs to it's name. The crowd 'oohs' and 'ahhs' along with the ebb and flow of the teenage boys grinding themselves into the ground.

It's only by chance that she sees him in the front row, nestled in with a few other teachers she recognizes from the diner. He looks different now, no tie, the spotlights from the other side of the field catching the gold in his hair and burning it's silhouette into the sky. Deceptively well muscled for someone so lithe.

He doesn't seem too enthralled. Sure, he claps when he should. Stands up, sits down in time with the crowd. Leans over and murmurs in his friends ear every once and a while. But mostly he just shakes his head at every call. Every play. Every hit.

It makes her blood boil.

She doesn't realize how hard she's staring until he turns around and looks at her dead in the eyes. Her stomach drops and her cheeks flush.

Éponine's gaze skids around the field in time to watch the second string wide receiver get pummeled into the goal post.

—-

Match on sound. A cup of creamer clatters to the table and, if Enjolras were a lesser man, he would've jumped. Instead, he looks up from his stack of papers with a calm he usually had to reserve for fifth period.

"Ms. Thénardier."

"Mr. Enjolras," she sneers, topping off his mug of coffee. "Happy you're still ruining my brother's only shot at a future?"

"I'm trying to give him an education," he deadpans, bloodying a particularly bad essay with red ink.

"The hell is he going to need an A in Government for?"

"Look," he says, "he doesn't have to get an A. He just needs a C. He's close you kn—"

"You're fucking up his recruitment for college."

He gives her a sideways glance and attempts to take a sip of his new coffee. It's too hot, far too hot. She smiles as he spits it back out, then she begins to walk away, her hair swishing behind her while she turns.

It really should be tied up, shouldn't it?

For some reason he clears his throat and she stops, turns around again. Her eyes are a lot sweeter than she lets on, he thinks. The way the eyelashes tangle at the corners…

Shit.

Say something.

It's his turn to look away, training his gaze on his papers once more. "He's not a senior yet. They won't be looking at him seriously. Not yet."

She scoffs and heads back to the kitchen.

He sits at a corner booth with a steaming cup of coffee and a phrase stuck in his throat.

—-

Later on he'll leave a twenty dollar tip on a ten dollar ticket. She'll stalk out of the diner after him in a flurry of gritted teeth and gravel dust.

Her shouts slice through the air, stopping him dead in the middle of the desolate parking lot. As soon as she turns around, she runs full force into him, driving the crumpled cash into his chest with her fist.

Zoom out as she screams a few choice words and stomps away while he winces too hard and holds his chest like he's dying.

Cut to black.

The next few weeks flash by in montage. Loud and fast and slow and quiet all at once. Enjolras puts three more players on academic suspension. On principle, Éponine throws away every letter he sends home. Gavroche sits on the bench.

No one is satisfied.

No one is happy.

But they move forward anyway.

—-

Yells and sneakers scrabbling against loose gravel. October has chilled the air and his pained breath comes out in short puffs of crystal. Hyper focus. Everything looks crispy with the fall season. Grey. Dreary, aside from the school colors scrawled across the store fronts in various congratulatory phrases.

She watches from her car as he stumbles down Main Street, hazy and defiant all at once. His friends walk beside him, quickly. Breathless. The steps are measured, sure, refusing to bely the adrenaline still raging through his veins, at odds with the signs that seem to cheer him on.

"WELCOME to football country"

"Goin' All The Way!"

"Everyone runs from the Red & Gray! Git'em!"

It's unclear who "them" is, especially considering how a teacher wearing those exact colors is currently walking away from a fist fight with a pissed off father.

Oh, Mr. Enjolras. You've gotten in too deep. He's got a smear of blood from nostril to earlobe. Sweat matted curls stuck to the back of his neck. He never threw a punch. Not one. Just took it. Let the red faced football dad crack him twice across the face.

She thought she'd enjoy it, but she's sitting there in a cold car trying desperately to figure out if he'd always walked with that hitch in his step.

—-

Headlines rain down, blurry in deep tilt focus. They run together. It's hard to tell if it makes her feel better or worse that the team is still winning. Not crushing, but winning.

State, here we come.

—-

We open once more on the quiet diner. Now it is Enjolras who walks into the Musain. Doesn't stalk, but walks. Biding his time in the cold. Dawn tries to help out, but fails to bring any warmth to the rows of empty booths. It's silent, nothing but the desolate sizzle of the griddle to keep him company until the school day starts.

Well. Nothing but her. Nothing but that fucking Thénardier chick standing behind the counter with the fucking morning stars in her hair.

All he wants is some coffee.

Running a tongue over his scabbed lip, moves to his usual spot. And she's there, already, slamming a glass of water onto the table.

"It's all he has, you know. It's the only way he'll get out of here," she says, voice low, eyes averted.

"No, it's not."

She almost laughs, a manic thing meant to stay the tears pricking at her eyelids. "You don't get it do you? You just don't get it, we're from the wrong side of the oil rigs, okay, we—"

"He's smart, Éponine," he says, not realizing he's walking forward until he's close enough to smell the dew on her shirt. "He aces his tests. He's brilliant in debate. And he is such a leader if I've ever seen one. Colleges will be begging to have him if he could manage to start handing his homework in."

Éponine is already shaking her head before he finishes speaking, unwilling to listen to anything that falls out of his Northern mouth. "We can't afford it. He has to get a football scholarship. It's his only hope to get out of—"

"He's too small," Enjolras' voice is matter of fact. Commanding. "Yes, he's fast. But he's too small to last. They will use him up and toss him aside."

It feels harsh, but it's really just the truth. She finally looks him in the eyes, challenging him once more. "You just don't get it do you? You just don't get football."

Then something changes, his gaze turns into a fire she can't escape. She is suddenly, painfully, aware of his height. Of his bulk. When he finally speaks, it is cold, his words methodic. He pushes a mass of curls away from his forehead and reveals a jagged white scar that stretches from his temple like cracked china. "Sixteen years old. Sacked so hard, my helmet came off. Twenty stitches. Broke my collarbone. Concussion bad enough that I stood in the shower for two hours trying to remember if I'd washed my hair or not."

She gulps and he continues.

He raises his left hand, the pinky finger sticking out in a peculiar, stiffened 's'. "Seventeen years old. Crushed under a set of cleats. Unsportsmanlike conduct. But, hey, at least the asshole had to sit out for the rest of the game, right?" Then he uses that hand to rub his right shoulder. "This shoulder here? It just falls out of socket sometimes. That started after approximately the sixth time is was dislocated. I think I was seventeen. Hard to keep track, you know?"

"I'm, uh—"

"Nineteen," he almost shouts it, hiking up his left knee. It makes some sort of awful sound when it bends and it sets Éponine's teeth on edge. "I was ninteen when my 'career' ended. Freshmen year of college. All recruited and scholarship-ed up in. Cornhuskers jersey. Got the nickname 'Pretty Boy' shortly. Some senior shattered my knee a few weeks after. Sounds like broken glass, doesn't it? But, here, let me show you my favorite."

With a frantic hand he grabs her wrist and presses her fingers into the space just below his collar bone. Right over his heart. A marble sized growth protruded out of the bone, just under the skin. Just enough for her to notice. "Twenty four. Years since I stepped foot on a field. Woke up one morning and I couldn't feel my fingertips. Did you know there's a nerve cluster that loops over your top rib? Turns out that collarbone injury never healed quite right. Didn't give it enough time. Pinched off that nerve. They had to remove my top rib."

They stand there for a few moments, breathing heavy, both of them feeling the staccato drum of his heart. Finally, he throws her hand down. Thoughts of Gav's young body being bruised to bits slice through her resolve. Tears spill onto her hot cheeks.

He's not quite sure what to do, so he leaves, his shoes punishing the ground where he walks.

—-

Match on action. Yellowed Keds shuffle into view. The halls are silent, class is in session. It still smells like floor wax and teenage boy deodorant. Not much had changed since she walked those halls. Not that she'd spent much time there anyhow.

She watches his classroom through the window panel in the door. It looks like organized chaos. Gav is at the head of the class, jabbing a finger at the blackboard while students raise their hands with gusto, flapping their hands for attention. Half the class flopping over the chairs indignantly at someone's answer. Enjolras stands at the side, leaning against the radiator. Smiling.

He looked beautiful.

But she was there for a reason, so she tapped on the glass, waving at a mildly embarrassed Gavroche as Enjolras made his way to the door.

"Miss Thénardier," he greets, cracking open the door just enough to poke his head through.

Éponine bites her lip with uncharacteristic sheepishness. "Mr. Enjolras. May I have a word?"

For a moment her just looks at her, scanning her face. "Sure, one moment." He turns around and murmurs a few stern words to the class before stepping out into the hallway. The classroom immediately erupts into disarray behind the closed door. All he does is roll his eyes. Kids, huh?

The two adults stand in silence though, all emotions drained after their last encounter. Baggage aired. Walls demolished. Wordlessly, she draws a paper, crumpled and smoothed and folded, from her apron and hands it to him.

Enjolras doesn't need to read it to know what it is. To recognize his own words. This is one of the many letters he had sent home with Gavroche.

"You two ready take me up on my offer?"

"I probably should have— It would've…" An apology lingers on her lips, but she's not sure if she can pull the trigger. "He's not going to like it, but I guess it's the best thing for him. Even if he doesn't like special treatment."

"Hardly," he shrugs, shoulders dropping noncommittal. "I offer tutoring to all my students. And he doesn't really need it. He just needs someone to make sure he finishes his homework. And I know how much you work."

"I can't promise he'll listen to you," she admits with a smile.

He lets out a breath like he's thinking, plush lips forming a perfect 'o'. "I could," he starts, still struggling to get the words he wants to say out of his mouth. "I could tutor him at, you know— at the diner. Both of us there, he'd have to listen to one of us."

"Probably."

A group of cheerleaders rush by, laughing and giggling, pony tails streaming in the air behind them. They're taping homecoming dance posters to the lockers. Drive by spirit. One girl stops, waves a little too coyly, and it takes them a second to realize Gavroche's grinning face is pressed to the glass behind them.

"Probably," Enjolras agrees.

Probably.


End file.
